An optimization-driven approach for computing geodesic paths on triangle meshes

There are many application scenarios where we need to refine an initial path lying on a surface to be as short as possible. A typical way to solve this problem is to iteratively shorten one segment of the path at a time. As local approaches, they are conceptually simple and easy to implement, but th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Bangquan, Chen, Shuangmin, Xin, Shi-Qing, He, Ying, Liu, Zhen, Zhao, Jieyu
Other Authors: School of Computer Science and Engineering
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/89439
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/46218
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:There are many application scenarios where we need to refine an initial path lying on a surface to be as short as possible. A typical way to solve this problem is to iteratively shorten one segment of the path at a time. As local approaches, they are conceptually simple and easy to implement, but they converge slowly and have poor performance on large scale models. In this paper, we develop an optimization driven approach to improve the performance of computing geodesic paths. We formulate the objective function as the total length and adopt the L-BFGS solver to minimize it. Computational results show that our method converges with super-linear rate, which significantly outperforms the existing methods. Moreover, our method is flexible to handle anisotropic metric, non-uniform density function, as well as additional user-specified constraints, such as coplanar geodesics and equally-spaced geodesic helical curves, which are challenging to the existing local methods.